Ogden Denies the Unconscious
The psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has been steadily producing a stream of papers since 1979. The inventor of such brainiac concepts as the autistic-contiguous position and the analytic third, Ogden has no small share in the look and feel of the contemporary post-Bionian field of psychoanalysis. But after ruminating for so long upon the gnarly antimonies of the unconscious, he has finally gnashed them too hard and has magicked himself to the other side; in a 2024 paper titled Rethinking the Concepts of the Unconscious and Analytic Time, Ogden finally claims that the unconscious does not exist.
I will admit that reading this paper broke my brain; I found it very hard to think afterwards and I questioned everything I thought I understood. Such intellectual vertigo is rare these days and well worth the price of entry. And yet, while I admire an attempt to formulate an undifferentiated psyche, Ogden is perhaps too confident that it is daylit consciousness that alone exists and I am reminded in particular of the famous William James essay of 1904, Does “Consciousness’ Exist? In which James declares emphatically that it does not exist; that consciousness is always conscious of something.
Ogden says this: “I find a comment by Paul Eluard (1968) valuable in reconceiving Freud’s conception of the ‘unconscious’: ‘There is another world, but it is in this one.’ Freud’s unconscious is another world, but it is in this one, in consciousness, not behind it or below it. What Freud called the unconscious is a quality of consciousness, not a realm that exists behind the repression barrier” (2024, p. 282). The other world in this one finds a striking parallel in the Buddhist notion that nirvana is samsara. There are not two realities; nirvana is no heavenly realm transcendent of the miserable existence of earth, but is rather inherent and immanent to our earthly existence now, always already.
Anyways, while my own biases would prefer to describe consciousness, as James does, as a rather nebulous and flimsy quality of a function—a function that the psychoanalyst would call the unconscious—I do think there is some value in not elevating the unconscious to the status of the holy spirit; and even to doubt its existence from time to time; (while acknowledging this doubt is the trend of the world, reducing the unconscious to subconscious, or shadow, or to the lumpen magic of anatomical neuroscience). If the unconscious is that psychical reality that must be inferred, it is no great surprise if the inference flickers now and then, like that UFO arising out of the swamp at twilight. Does not the unconscious (or nirvana for that matter) act as a cypher for what lies beyond the limits of our knowledge? A two-bit knowledge that must necessarily occlude and obscure our perception?
I Can See the Whole Room...and There's Nobody in It!, 1961, Roy Lichtenstein
